To this animated appeal of Ambrosio, Onuphrio replied in the most tranquil manner and with the air of an unmoved philosopher:—­“You mistake me, Ambrosio, if you consider me as hostile to Christianity.  I am not of the school of the French Encyclopaedists, or of the English infidels.  I consider religion as essential to man, and belonging to the human mind in the same manner as instincts belong to the brute creation, a light, if you please of revelation to guide him through the darkness of this life, and to keep alive his undying hope of immortality:  but pardon me if I consider this instinct as equally useful in all its different forms, and still a divine light through whatever medium or cloud of human passion or prejudice it passes.  I reverence it in the followers of Brahmah, in the disciple of Mahomet, and I wonder at in all the variety of forms it adopts in the Christian world.  You must not be angry with me that I do not allow infallibility to your Church, having been myself brought up by Protestant parents, who were rigidly attached to the doctrines of Calvin.”

I saw Ambrosio’s countenance kindle at Onuphrio’s explanation of his opinions, and he appeared to be meditating an angry reply.  I endeavoured to change the conversation to the state of the Colosaeum, with which it had begun.  “These ruins,” I said, “as you have both observed, are highly impressive; yet when I saw them six years ago they had a stronger effect on my imagination; whether it was the charm of novelty, or that my mind was fresher, or that the circumstances under which I saw them were peculiar, I know not, but probably all these causes operated in affecting my mind.  It was a still and beautiful evening in the end of May; the last sunbeams were dying away in the western sky and the first moonbeams shining in the eastern; the bright orange tints lighted up the ruins and as it were kindled the snows that still remained on the distant Apennines, which were visible from the highest accessible part of the amphitheatre.  In this glow of colouring, the green of advanced spring softened the grey and yellow tints of the decaying stones, and as the lights gradually became fainter, the masses appeared grander and more gigantic; and when the twilight had entirely disappeared, the contrast of light and shade in the beams of the full moon and beneath a sky of the brightest sapphire, but so highly illuminated that only Jupiter and a few stars of the first magnitude were visible, gave a solemnity and magnificence to the scene which awakened the highest degree of that emotion which is so properly termed the sublime.  The beauty and the permanency of the heavens and the principle of conservation belonging to the system of the universe, the works of the Eternal and Divine Architect, were finely opposed to the perishing and degraded works of man in his most active and powerful state.  And at this moment so humble appeared to me the condition of the most exalted beings belonging to the earth,